21–30 of 141 posts
> First Light is working towards a pilot plant producing ~150 MW of electricity and costing less than $1 billion in the 2030s. Finally, fusion in only ten to twenty years. I've been waiting ten to twenty years for this!
> First Light is working towards a pilot plant producing ~150 MW of electricity and costing less than $1 billion in the 2030s. Finally, fusion in only ten to twenty years. I've been waiting ten to twenty years for this!
A little engineering later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4qRY3h_eo
Fusion is a harder problem than that but we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible and the surrounding technology like compact higher temperature superconductors has advanced significantly since the 1960s and 1970s.
I am typing this on a computer with a ~5nm feature size CPU. Hard things can be done. It takes time, focus, and funding.
I know that technically it's a "scheme", but with the history of this technology they should probably use different language
The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. A little engineering later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4qRY3h_eo Fusion is a harder problem than that but we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible and the surrounding technology like compact higher temperature superconductors has advanced significantly…
One of the easiest (laziest?) positions one can hold is simply to be dismissive of anything that hasn't happened yet, and which appears to be moderately difficult or harder. Fusion, AGI, etc... Just dismiss those things as ridiculous and you position yourself as wise, informed, erudite, whatever - to most people.
You too can achieve nuclear fusion! https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/ And just like everyone else, you'll suck up a lot more energy than you'll produce
> First Light has achieved fusion having spent less than £45 million, and with a rate of performance improvement faster than any other fusion scheme in history. I know that technically it's a "scheme", but with the history of this technology they should probably use different language
It's remarkable and humorous how it's just a gun. Like this is how the Victorians would have approached fusion. More power to them! We need to test a myriad of approaches. This could well turn out to be the best one.
"Little Boy" the first nuke deployed in Japan was also just a gun, firing a lump of enriched uranium at another lump of enriched uranium at the end of a tube.
>> For the first fifty years after 1945, every published description and drawing of the Little Boy mechanism assumed that a small, solid projectile was fired into the center of a larger, stationary target.[31] However, critical mass considerations dictated that in Little Boy the larger, hollow piece would be the projectile.
I had never heard this before and was in denial reading the part above that. So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light.
Edit: Following the reference is was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coster-Mullen
The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. A little engineering later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4qRY3h_eo Fusion is a harder problem than that but we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible and the surrounding technology like compact higher temperature superconductors has advanced significantly…